Now it’s time to to move my little blog on a modern stack. Best offer on OpenShift is a variation of the standard LEMP (we can call it: LEMP-HH) stack with HHVM 3.8, MariaDB 5.5 over NGINX 1.7.

Actually biggest performances improvement was achieved adding a good cache plugin a few months ago. I always used W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache but, in this specific case, they are both complex to use because of the structure of OpenShift stack. Best solution I found is WP Fastest Cache plugin, one of the latest cache plugin I tested. Here is the stunning header of their website showing two beautiful cheetahs (are they cheetahs?).

Anyway coming back on new stack, there is no official bundle yet but you can create a new application using tengyifei’s HHVM 3.8 cartridge and adding OpenShift MariaDB 5.5 cartridge. I wasn’t able to run them on different gears (with scaling option activated and HAProxy) but seems fast enough on a single gear.

Filesystem structure is similar to the standard PHP bundle except for the application dir that is named www/ instead of php/. I used last backup from UpdraftPlus to migrate database on MariaDB. On non scalable applications you need to forward port in order to access DB from your local machine. RHC command is:

Moving on NGINX also causes problems on permalinks because .htaccess doesn’t work anymore. The Nginx Helper plugin fix the problem but you could simply add a couple of row to NGINX configuration located in /config/nginx.d/default.conf.erb.

Refactor of previous filesystem, migration of database and bugfix of permalinks and other stuff takes about 2 hours and, at the end, everything seems working fine. I’m quite confident this a future proof solution but I’m going to test it until next major update 🙂

[UPDATE 2015-09-06 21:56 CEST]

After migration sitemap_index.xml and robots.txt weren’t reachable. Some rules were missing. I took the opportunity to switch to Yoast SEO for sitemap, Facebook open graph and Twitter cards. Then, these rules fix problems with SEO.